The Shores of Bell: Play Doom on Nintendo’s $99 Alarm Clock

Recently, a creative twist emerged in the gaming world when the Nintendo Alarmo alarm clock was cleverly hacked by Twitter user GaryOderNichts. This innovation allowed the shareware version of Doom to be run on it, and Gary shared a video showcasing his achievement in a Twitter thread earlier this week.

In this thread, Gary explains the limitations he’s currently facing, such as the lack of audio support. To get Doom running, the .wad file of the shareware version needs to be compressed and then uncompressed during the boot process due to USB loader memory constraints. Importantly, if you’re keen to try this yourself, Gary assures that modifications to your Alarmo aren’t necessary. All the necessary project files are conveniently hosted on GitHub.

Curious about how this was achieved? Gary dives into the details in a comprehensive blog post. It all began with dismantling an Alarmo to examine the internal components. At its core, the Nintendo Alarmo is powered by an STM32H730ZBI6 Arm Cortex-M7 processor—a well-documented and explored chipset. This foundational knowledge paved the way for Gary to hack the Alarmo and link it with his Raspberry Pi.

Gary’s journey involved some soldering and modding to get Doom running successfully. However, the final setup available on GitHub doesn’t require any hardware modifications to launch Doom from a USB drive.

The controls are ingeniously adapted to the Alarmo’s design. The alarm’s surface features two buttons and a touch dial, which are repurposed for the game. For instance, in this version of Doom, the swipe motion on the touch dial allows you to aim left and right, while the shooting function is activated using the notification button at the lower right. The video demo provides a glimpse of these controls in action, albeit during just one of the early levels.

The notion of running Doom on a $99 alarm clock might seem outlandish, but it’s not the only surprising piece of tech to join the Doom club. The game has found its home on a variety of unexpected platforms, from smart lawnmowers to the Raspberry Pi Pico RP2350 microcontroller and even an air hockey table. In another ambitious hack, someone even managed to craft an expansion card for the old Commodore 64, allowing it to power Doom.

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